Automated message-generating arrangements have a wide range of applications. For example, in interactive voice-response systems, they are used to generate messages for playback to a user which either provide the user with information or prompt the user for action.
The design and use of the message-generating arrangement is relatively simple if only one language is supported. For example, the sentence structure required for any announcement is known a-priori, thereby making the construction of announcements relatively simple. However, even if only one language is supported, there is still a problem of entering information that is context-dependent or user-dependent into the announcements. An example of context-dependent information is singular versus plural terms. An example of user-dependent information is date information: "day/month" order in some cultures versus "month/day" order in others.
As a result of language-, culture-, or market-specific variations in representing information, the design of the message-generating arrangement usually is language-, culture-, or market-specific. But this limits use of the arrangement to only the particular market, culture, or language for which it was designed, and different designs must be created for each market, culture and language. This is very expensive and highly inefficient.
To avoid this problem, efforts have been made to design message-generating arrangements that are language-, culture-, or market-independent. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,375,164 discloses a voice-messaging system whose design is based upon "semantic expressions" that are used to evaluate language-, culture-, or market-specific data. While effective, this design still does not separate the "semantic expressions" from associated application code to the extent needed to make the design completely application-independent and therefore completely versatile and generic.